Reading 2 "The Art World Feats of Clay"

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/06/031006craw_artworld?currentPage=1

The Art World Feats of Clay: Ken Price’s Ceramic Art by Peter Schjeldahl

From this writing I have many ideas and thoughts. I will begin by quoting the author then comment on these quotes individually because I am unsure of a better way to respond to the many ideas this article has brought to mind other than one idea and then the next.

• “Like white light, which is the sum of all colors, such pleasure subsumes a spectrum of ideas, feelings, and sensations, which, if one is so inclined, can be sorted out through a prism of analysis.”

This metaphor brings so many beautiful images to my imagination as well as adeptly fits many of the concepts I have been struggling with; like a map in my head I wonder how it all -everything in life- fits together, but now I realize it fits together like the colors of a rainbow without the order all at once (white light). Could all of my ideas that I feel strongly about be a color? Could I simplify everything and simply make it a color? Dont we teach little kids that colors equal emotions? Isn’t that what we -as humans- try to do? Categorize everything into neat drawers of schemas?

Is this not what the art historians have done with Ceramics? Have they not put ceramics in a box named craftsy art that does not belong in a museum?

•  “To overeducated eyes, a perceived relation of an art object to conventions of domestic function is corny unless pointedly ironic."

What comes to mind is Meret Oppenheim’s Object. 

 

 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80997  So again we run into the issue of space for ceramics. Without the object being ironic, or a historical find it seems to have some difficulty finding its place in the art world, instead it finds its place in domestic settings merging and assimilating.

“Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has called the field of art-- the galleries and museums, and the people who guard and open their gates, including museum curators, gallery owners, and other artists. Together these gatekeepers decide whose work will be exhibited and immortalized. While social media and other cultural forces are breaking down the traditional mediums of control, access, and authority, gatekeepers still exert powerful influence on what the public and various specialized audiences consider to be great or worthy. Artists need to respond to the gatekeepers in one way or another along a continuum running from acquiescence to abject transgression, and student- artists need to come to understand those interactions.”- Studio Art II by Lois Hetland, Winner, Veenema and Sheridan 

To us as artists, just keep creating.

• “Something similar might be said about all of our joys in life, which recent brain research asks us to imagine as particular cocktails of hormones and neurotransmitters.”

This reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite books by Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, “I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside.” Can I make this idea into a sculpture? 

• “But artistic pleasure differs from other kinds in being deliberately structured and thus encouraging to analysis, which is fun for the rational mind.”

Rational minds analyse information received from art. Art is enjoyable to different people for different reasons. For a child, it is evidence of existence, for the philosopher it is the ideas to and from the art that matter, for the teacher it is the growth of the student in developing an idea through features of art, for the average viewer it is the interaction between them and the object.This interaction is a rather selfish, greedy interaction… one of the reasons we create is to serve our viewer. We intentionally form our work with the selfish viewer in mind. Art is the giving of yourself (in time and effort) or the manifestations of the self or experiences or an inkling of an idea. Where viewing art is a selfish encounter. We come to feel what the artist is trying to convey, be it power or strength or happiness, we take it.  I never thought of it this way... 

• “Visual art sits still and lets us alternate looking and thinking, at our leisure.“

Observations lead to questions, questions lead to hypothesis and the imagination. Imagination leads to art, but it had to come from somewhere, thus we take from what we observe and experience, remix it and spit it back out. 
 

• “The objects that occasion these thoughts rest on standard pedestals and are spotlighted like jewels. ... They range in height from only three and a half inches to nearly two feet; the little ones occupy elegant cases made of wood and glass.” and “It adopts standoffish conventions of “art” display, notably pedestals. (Shelves, tables, and vitrines are customary for ceramics.)”

The description of the art and how it is displayed brings new ideas to mind, as to the displaying of work. Not only did price elevate the status of ceramics from being a household object, by placing his work on “standard pedestals.” He also chose to build boxes or cases for some of his work to be shown in, “and they forbid being picked up—some by being encased, others by promising back injury if you were to try. But their identity as intimate objects handmade in clay prevails, exerting a subliminal tug. They generate a feeling of private space—of home, even—around themselves.”
This disallows the viewer to have the old fashioned experience of holding/ physically handling a ceramic object.

• “Price’s belated prestige signifies something that is afoot in the culture of art these days: a shift of emphasis away from conceptualist modes that set ideas above experience and toward aesthetic practices that put experience first. A fine old slogan of the poet William Carlos Williams may be due another inning: ‘No ideas but in things.’”

This reminds me of inception. That if you blatantly tell someone an idea it can be rejected, but if the idea is subtle like from an art form the idea is more likely to take hold. How can art project an idea without directly stating an idea? For example if I wanted the viewer to acknowledge vegetarianism as reasonable option would I show images of dead animals or animals being slaughtered? or would I create a piece that provoked compassion for a live animal?